4-Day Intensive Trauma Training

Trauma is a complex issue—the problems are deep and challenging to explore. In order to provide help, we need effective, scientifically-based tools that work at healing both the mind and body.

Register today to learn from leading experts Janina Fisher, John and Julie Gottman, Frank Anderson, Deany Laliotis, and Anita Mandley on some of the most powerful trauma treatment methods available.

**All credit information and individual webcast descriptions can be found under the individual sessions on the course tab.
 

Thursday, March 22, 2018
9:30 am – 12:00 pm & 1:00 – 4:00 pm (Eastern)
Opening the Heart: How to Deepen the Experience of Therapy
Janina Fisher, PhD
We often use terms like hard-hearted to describe those who can’t seem to feel empathy or connect to their own emotions, forgetting that the roots of open-heartedness grow out of safe and loving relationships early in life. Emotionally disconnected clients often flee from the deepening we try to facilitate in therapy because their bodies simply don’t know how to do empathy. In this workshop, we’ll explore simple, body-oriented ways of helping clients have more open, connected, heartfelt experiences.

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Friday, March 23, 2018
11:00 am – 1:00 pm
Cultural and Historical Traumas: Invisible Barriers to Healing and Change
Anita Mandley, MS, LCPC
If you work with African Americans, Native Americans, holocaust survivors and their descendants, intergenerational poverty, or refugees, then whether you realize it or not, your work is being influenced by the legacies of cultural and historical trauma. If your clients differ from you in the areas of race, culture, religion, sexuality, class or gender, your own biases are there as well. This workshop brings these issues out of the shadows and into consciousness, and opens a new path toward addressing the hidden grief of cultural and historical wounds.

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Friday, March 23, 2018
3:00 – 5:00 pm (Eastern)
Treating Complex Trauma Clients at the Edge: How Brain Science Can Inform Interventions
Frank Anderson, MD
Therapists often get shaken and lose confidence in their approach when a client’s trauma response edges into seemingly uncontrollable extremes of rage, panic, or suicidal desperation. This workshop provides an essential road map for treating relational trauma cases through a detailed exploration of the neurobiological processes of hyperarousal and parasympathetic withdrawal underlying extreme symptoms.

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Saturday, March 24, 2018
Part 1: 11:00 am – 1:00 pm Part 2: 3:00 – 5:00 pm (Eastern)
Mastering the Craft of Treating Trauma: Four Core Skills
Deany Laliotis, LICSW
Underlying all the techniques and methodologies for treating trauma today is a core set of fundamental skills that determine a clinician’s effectiveness in this challenging arena of practice. This workshop will identify and explore in depth the clinical skills that transcend theoretical paradigms, bringing together all that we know about trauma treatment.

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Sunday, March 25, 2018
10:00 am – 1:00 pm (Eastern)
Couples Therapy for Treating Trauma: The Gottman Method Approach
Julie Gottman, PhD & John Gottman, PhD
Trauma treatments have largely ignored the interpersonal symptoms of PTSD. But whether caused by early abandonment, childhood abuse, military combat, or other traumatic experiences, the impact of trauma on committed relationships is commonly encountered in everyday practice. In this workshop, using some recorded materials, we’ll focus on a therapy that interweaves individual PTSD treatment with the interpersonal orientation of Gottman Method Couples Therapy.

Full Course Description

120 - Opening the Heart: How to Deepen the Experience of Therapy

We often use terms like hard-hearted to describe those who can’t seem to feel empathy or connect to their own emotions, forgetting that the roots of open-heartedness grow out of safe and loving relationships early in life. Emotionally disconnected clients often flee from the deepening we try to facilitate in therapy because their bodies simply don’t know how to doempathy. In this workshop, we’ll explore simple, body-oriented ways of helping clients have more open, connected, heartfelt experiences. You’ll discover:

• Specific and simple movement interventions that physically open the heart and allow clients more access to emotion
• Ways to transform fear of emotional vulnerability through the body, including engaging the spine and core
• Which somatic experiences contribute to an open heart by experimenting with movement and tension, and which don’t
• How to use the heart as a resource in treatment by changing heart-rate variability
• Methods to support the heart physically and relax the extremities to relieve stress

Program Information

Outline

• Early attachment and the capacity for empathy
  • Somatic effects of anxious or traumatic attachment
  • How the body protects us from hurt: armoring, bracing, constricting
  • Consequences in later life: emotional distance, guarded, closed off
• When clients cannot feel, working with the body feels safer than accessing emotion
  • Increase engagement in spine and core to promote internal sense of safety
  • Experiment with changes in posture, shoulders, opening the chest, relaxing the body
  • Experiment with increasing or decreasing heart rate and tension
• Use the client’s history to diagnose why the body has closed off emotion
  • What necessitated distance from emotion?
  • How did guarding, constricting, or armoring help client survive?
  • What happens when the client thinks about being vulnerable?
• Accessing the social engagement system also evokes emotional engagement
  • Make use of the facial muscles, larynx, movements of the head and neck
  • Increase playfulness, laughter, lightness
  • Avoid pressure on client to feel vulnerable emotions

Objectives

• Discover specific and simple movement interventions that physically open the heart and allow clients more access to emotion
• Discover ways to transform fear of emotional vulnerability through the body, including engaging the spine and core
• Discover which somatic experiences contribute to an open heart by experimenting with movement and tension, and which don’t
• Discover how to use the heart as a resource in treatment by changing heart-rate variability
• Discover methods to support the heart physically and relax the extremities to relieve stress

Target Audience

Addiction Counselors, Counselors, Marriage & Family Therapists, Nurses, Physician, Psychologists, Social Workers, and other Mental Health Professionals

223 - Cultural and Historical Traumas: Invisible Barriers to Healing and Change

If you work with African Americans, Native Americans, holocaust survivors and their descendants, intergenerational poverty, or refugees, then whether you realize it or not, your work is being influenced by the legacies of cultural and historical trauma. If your clients differ from you in the areas of race, culture, religion, sexuality, class or gender, your own biases are there as well. This workshop brings these issues out of the shadows and into consciousness, and opens a new path toward addressing the hidden grief of cultural and historical wounds. You’ll discover:

• How to assess the impact of cultural and historical traumas on clients and yourself
• How to move clients from reflexive reactivity to a conscious state of presence that allows for connection, fluidity, and coherence in the here and now
• How to uncover the survival narrative, validate the trauma, and move to a strengths-based process of change with clients

Program Information

Outline

Point One: Awareness, Acknowledgement and Assessment

• Acknowledgement and awareness of the intergenerational impact and memory traces of cultural and historical traumas on clients and the therapist’s own self
• Learn relevant areas for assessment and a structured model of assessment
• Case examples of the clinical implications of those traumatic experiences in the present

Point Two: Moving from reflexive reactivity to connection, fluidity and coherence in the here and now

• Learn the difference between bias, prejudice and the “isms”, and a process to regulate the neurobiology of bias
• Learn the benefit and power of providing the resources of witness, protector and comforter to heal intergenerational wounds

Point Three: How to uncover the survival narrative, validate the trauma, and move to a strengths-based process of empowerment and healing

• Studying, listening to and validating the client’s traumatic cultural narrative, while listening for the resources that helped them survive
• Using the client’s own survival resources, as well as cultural-specific rituals and/or creating new rituals for acknowledging and processing the loss and grief connected to historical traumas
• Look at new ways to establish boundaries and self-defense and self-protection

Objectives

1. Evaluate the clinical implications of clients with historical trauma to inform the clinician’s choice of treatment interventions.
2. Articulate clinical interventions that acknowledge and process grief and loss connected to the client’s historical trauma.

Target Audience

Addiction Counselors, Counselors, Marriage & Family Therapists, Nurses, Physician, Psychologists, Social Workers, and other Mental Health Professionals

316 - Treating Complex Trauma Clients at the Edge: How Brain Science Can Inform Interventions

Therapists often get shaken and lose confidence in their approach when a client’s trauma response edges into seemingly uncontrollable extremes of rage, panic, or suicidal desperation. This workshop provides an essential road map for treating relational trauma cases through a detailed exploration of the neurobiological processes of hyperarousal and parasympathetic withdrawal underlying extreme symptoms. You’ll discover:

• How to stay clear and calm while working with clients in extreme states
• The difference between a compassionate and empathic response, and how each can either benefit or escalate you client
• When it’s necessary to take over, be the “auxiliary brain” for your client, and work top-down, with the mind first, emotions next, and body sensations last
• When it’s best to slow down, hand over control, and work with the body

Program Information

Outline

• Experiential Treatments – Integrating neuroscience and psychotherapy
  • Necessity of utilizing physical, emotional and relationship aspects in therapeutic intervention
• Problems with traditional phase oriented treatment
  • Negative evaluation of symptoms – ignoring their protective function
• Internal Family Systems
  • Understanding symptom presentation as positive efforts pushed to extremes
  • Welcoming and integrating all parts of an individual
  • Identifying intent of symptomology, importance of avoiding shaming
• Redefining trauma related diagnoses and integrating overactive protective mechanisms
  • Disorganized attachment
  • Borderline Personality Disorder, Dissociative Identity Disorder
• Therapist factors – vulnerabilities
  • Impact of therapist parts acting as separately as the clients we work with
  • Responding effectively to personal triggers
• Symptoms of post trauma
  • Hyperarousal, hyperarousal, psychic wounds
  • Importance of obtaining permission before addressing psychic wounds
• Experiential exercise – self-awareness, response to triggers
• Mind-brain relationships
  • Neuroplasticity, neural integration
  • Neural networks associated with trauma
  • Implicit nature of trauma memories
• Autonomic nervous system
  • Role of cortisol
  • Sympathetic hyper-arousal
  • Characteristics of extreme symptom activation and mixed states
• Therapeutic responses
  • Choosing compassion or empathic responses
  • Providing auxiliary cognition
  • Strategies to avoid contributing to hyperarousal
  • Top down strategies to separate or unblend
• Case presentation – example of permission seeking, direct access and unblending
• Polyvagal Theory
  • Dorsal and ventral branches
  • Activating strategies, responding to hypo-arousal, blunting

Objectives

• Discover how to stay clear and calm while working with clients in extreme states
• Discover the difference between a compassionate and empathic response, and how each can either benefit or escalate you client
• Discover when it’s necessary to take over, be the “auxiliary brain” for your client, and work top-down, with the mind first, emotions next, and body sensations last
• Discover when it’s best to slow down, hand over control, and work with the body

Target Audience

Addiction Counselors, Counselors, Marriage & Family Therapists, Nurses, Physician, Psychologists, Social Workers, and other Mental Health Professionals

414 & 514 - Mastering the Craft of Treating Trauma: Four Core Skills

Underlying all the techniques and methodologies for treating trauma today is a core set of fundamental skills that determine a clinician’s effectiveness in this challenging arena of practice. This workshop will identify and explore in depth the clinical skills that transcend theoretical paradigms, bringing together all that we know about trauma treatment. You’ll discover:

• How to increase your ability to track and respond to a client’s moment-to-moment experience, especially during extreme states of distress that carry the danger of retraumatization
• How to rise to the challenge of negotiating with difficult parts of the client’s inner self that can become activated without warning
• The importance of helping clients access their strengths and reinforce their resilience, rather than allowing them to define themselves as victims of trauma
• How to expand your ability to work with the “radical aloneness” that lies at trauma’s core

Program Information

Objectives

1. Manage the clinical demands of working with developmental trauma using the core clinical skills.
2. Develop the clinical implications of trauma as they manifest in the consulting room and in the client’s life.
3. Analyze the history of client’s significant attachments as it relates to case conceptualization.
4. Analyze the efficacy of the four core clinician skills in relation to assessment and treatment planning.

Target Audience

Addiction Counselors, Counselors, Marriage & Family Therapists, Nurses, Physician, Psychologists, Social Workers, and other Mental Health Professionals

602 - Couples Therapy for Treating Trauma: The Gottman Method Approach

Trauma treatments have largely ignored the interpersonal symptoms of PTSD. But whether caused by early abandonment, childhood abuse, military combat, or other traumatic experiences, the impact of trauma on committed relationships is commonly encountered in everyday practice. In this workshop, using some recorded materials, we’ll focus on a therapy that interweaves individual PTSD treatment with the interpersonal orientation of Gottman Method Couples Therapy. You’ll discover how to:

• Better recognize the signs of trauma and the impact it has on a relationship
• Help one or both partners surface and address past trauma
• Foster the couple’s transformation of trauma into greater compassion for each other, deeper insight, and meaningful growth

Program Information

Objectives

1. Determine the impact of PTSD on a couple’s relationship to inform the clinician’s choice of treatment interventions for both the individual and couple.
2. Apply simple yet effective clinical interventions in session to help clients acquire a new perspective of PTSD and a more adaptive approach to managing symptoms.
3. Assess the often ignored social and interpersonal symptoms of PTSD in clients.

Target Audience

Addiction Counselors, Counselors, Marriage & Family Therapists, Nurses, Physician, Psychologists, Social Workers, and other Mental Health Professionals